The 8 Drinks That Made My Career: Jim Meehan

Jim Meehan may have achieved cocktail supremacy at PDT—his world-renowned bar in the East Village, where bartenders routinely mix drinks with multiple obscure ingredients and reservations are made weeks in advance—but he started off in a place familiar to us all: Drinking Milwaukee’s Best at a high school party.

His professional path included churning out shots at a crowded college bar—“I had the joy of having my front tooth knocked out there,” he recalls—and working a busy brunch service at Manhattan’s Five Points. From there, he began hobnobbing with some of New York’s most accomplished mixologists—including Eben Freeman at wd-50 and Audrey Saunders at Pegu Club—and honed his signature style.

Last year, Meehan’s first book, The PDT Cocktail Book: The Complete Bartender’s Guide from the Celebrated Speakeasy, was dubbed “the most buzzed-about cocktail guide in the country” by New York Times, and this past May, he took home the first ever James Beard award for Outstanding Bar Program.

“The drinks I’ve served have evolved with the times,” he says, humbly, of his path. Here, he breaks down the eight essential tipples that shaped his career along the way.

This interview has been condensed and edited.

1. Milwaukee's Best

My first drink was when I was 15. I remember one occasion particularly well: There was a girl in my school who was a year older and really liked me [even though] she was dating a linebacker on the football team. I think she was an actual cheerleader, so it was a bit of a coup. She invited me to a house party with all her hot older girlfriends and I proceeded to drink ten beers. I think it was Milwaukee’s Best, “the Beast.” It might have been “Beast Light.” So, I got sick, and then I called my dad to pick me up. I remember the icy sidewalk from the front door to the car door. He just drove me home and never got mad at me for that. And I was obviously wasted.

2. The Rose Bowl, State Street Brats

When I was a student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, I got a job at State Street Brats. It was a real rough and tumble, “access all areas” introduction to the restaurant world. By the time I was 20, I was managing the place, but I couldn’t drink. The Rose Bowl was this 16-ounce plastic cup filled with all sorts of sweet things, like punch. I also made every single crazy shot you could ever imagine—Snake Bites, B52s, shots of Jaeger. The takeaway? Cocktails are very much like fashion. It would be easy for me to look down at those drinks and say, “I’m so above that, it’s disgusting.” But the drink resonated in that audience. When Beverly Hills Cop is the best selling movie of the year and when life is one comedy after another because the economy is so strong, of course you turn to fuck-off drinks to amuse yourself.

3. Montenegro Manhattan, Pace

After moving to New York and working at Five Points, I created the cocktail program at Pace [a now-shuttered Italian restaurant owned by Danny Abrams and Jimmy Bradley], which was my first big break. I took classic American cocktails and gave them an Italian twist. Andrew Knowlton [of Bon Appétit] featured the Montenegro Manhattan as the best drink of the year. It was simply a Manhattan made with amaro instead of sweet vermouth. Obviously, nowadays you see drinks made with amaro all the time, but back then they were harder to find.

4. Goldrush, Milk and Honey

I met Eben Freeman at wd~50 because I lived around the corner at the time and he was bartending there. He knew the wine list backwards and forwards, the sake list backwards and forwards—he was very much a professional bartender, and he was the first person to take me to Milk and Honey. There was no menu; they asked you what spirit you liked, what style of drink you liked, and Joseph [Schwartz] brought me a Goldrush. I’ll never forget, he had this antique cocktail tray with a candle on it, and he put this thick weird dental napkin down and placed a frozen double Old Fashioned glass with a giant cube of hand cut ice in it. There was also a stainless steel iced tea straw which had been cut perfectly to fit the glass, and I realized, “I’ve been serving cocktails for almost eight years and I’ve never had a cocktail like this.” It was perfectly balanced, and the citrus just sort of shined through.

5. The R n’ R, Gramercy Tavern

When I was at Gramercy, I used our produce—it was very seasonal there—and our tea a lot in drinks. One day, Nancy [Olsen, pastry chef] came back from Paris with some Pierre Hermé geleés. One of the geleés was raspberry, rose, and lychee. I had never had that flavor combination before and it was in spring, right when lychees were available. Well, lychee kind of fell off when I realized how much of a pain it was to go to Chinatown and get fresh lychees and peel them, but the raspberry and rose stayed. I created a tea highball using bourbon, raspberry, rosewater, and tea, and I garnished it with dried tea roses and raspberries. That was very much a Gramercy drink that I wouldn’t do at PDT. Tea would be used here [at PDT] as a spirit infusion or a syrup.

6. Astoria Bianco, Gramercy Tavern

With this drink, I was trying to approximate the flavor of lost ingredients. When Flatiron [Lounge] opened [in 2003], vintage cocktail books filled with these mythical, early-1900s, late-1800s recipes were in the hands of very few. For me, collecting old cocktail books was a way to learn about the past of bartending, when bartending was a valued craft. This drink was a simple variation on the Astoria Cocktail, from The Old Waldorf-Astoria Bar Book. The original drink was Old Tom gin with vermouth and orange bitters, and I took Martini Bianco—a sweet white vermouth— and mixed it with gin and orange bitters. Julie Reiner [of Flatiron Lounge] asked me if she could put it on her guest bartending menu, so that was a huge honor for me.

7. 21st Century, Pegu Club

There was an old recipe called the 20th Century, published in 1937, named after the 20th Century train [which ran from Chicago to New York]. When I made it at Pegu Club, I used tequila, lemon juice, white crème de cacao, and Pernod. It was what we called back then the "Mr. Potato Head Theory of Mixing Drinks," where you take a classic drink and tweak the ingredients to come up with something new, and then you name it after what you tweaked. At the time, we were one of the first to make a living doing that. A) It’s cool because it was one of the only drinks I got on the menu at Pegu Club, and B) That’s a pretty good name for a cocktail.

8. Mezcal Mule, PDT

This drink has muddled cucumber, housemade ginger beer, passion fruit juice, lime juice, single-village mezcal, and cayenne. There’s sour from the lime and the passion fruit, spice from the ginger beer, strength and smoke from the spirit, a floral and vegetal quality from the cucumber, and heat from the cayenne—so when made properly, it’s a drink that is strong, sweet, sour, floral, smoky, and hot. I’ve always said cocktails are not a vehicle to get drunk, although they are intoxicating. Here, you’re getting a flavor experience in the same way that you do when you’re eating at, say, Gramercy Tavern. You’re not eating to get full, you’re eating to see what the chef is doing.

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